Teaching Christianity
salvation. This we should be making use of with a certain love and delight that is not, so to say, permanently settled in, but transitory, rather, and casual, like love and delight in a road, or in vehicles, or any other tools and gadgets you like, or if you can think of any better way of putting it, so that we love the means by which we are being carried along, on account of the goal to which we are being carried.
36, 40. So if it seems to you that you have understood the divine scriptures, or any part of them, in such a way that by this understanding you do not build up this twin love of God and neighbor, then you have not yet understood them. If on the other hand you have made judgments about them that are helpful for building up this love, but for all that have not said what the author you have been reading actually meant in that place, then your mistake is not pernicious, and you certainly cannot be accused of lying. Being a liar, of course, means having the intention of saying what is false; and that is why we find many people intending to lie, but intending to be mistaken, none.
So since a person does the one thing knowingly, experiences the other thing unwittingly, it is abundantly obvious that over one and the same thing the person who is mistaken or deceived is better than the person who tells a lie. Everyone who tells a lie, after all, is committing iniquity; and if it seems to anyone that a lie may sometimes be useful, then it can also seem to him that iniquity is sometimes useful. No liar, after all, in the very act of telling a lie is keeping faith; but what he wants, of course, is that the person he tells it to should have faith in him, faith which by lying he is for all that failing to keep. But every violation of faith, or trust, is iniquitous. Either, therefore, iniquity is sometimes useful, which cannot be, or lying is never useful.[42]
41. But any who understand a passage in the scriptures to mean something which the writer did not mean are mistaken, though the scriptures are not deceiving them. But all the same, as I had started to say, if they are mistaken in a judgment which is intended to build up charity, which is the end of the law (1 Tm 1:5), they are mistaken in the same sort of way as people who go astray off the road, but still proceed by rough paths to the same place as the road was taking them to. Still, they must be put right, and shown how much more useful it is not to leave the road, in case they get into the habit of deviating from it, and are eventually driven to take the wrong direction altogether.
37, But by rashly asserting something that the writer they are reading did not mean, people frequently hit upon other opinions which it is impossible to square with the author's meaning, such that if they are convinced these opinions are true and certain, what the writer meant cannot be true. Then it can happen with them, how I cannot tell, that they start being angrier with scripture than with themselves—a bad attitude which will be totally destructive if they allow it to spread. For we walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor 5:7); but faith will start tottering if the authority of scripture is undermined; then with faith tottering, charity itself also begins to sicken. Because if you fall from faith, you are bound also to fall from charity; it is impossible, after all, to love what you do not believe exists. On the other hand, if you both believe and love, then by doing good and complying with the requirements of good morals, you ensure that you also hope to come eventually to what you love. And so we have these three things, for whose sake all knowledge and all prophecy are pressed into service, faith, hope, charity. [43]
38, 42. But faith gives way to sight, which we shall see, and hope gives way to bliss itself, which we are going to arrive at, while charity will actually grow when these other two fade out. After all, if we love by believing what we cannot yet see, how much more will we do so when we have begun to see it? And if we love, by hoping for it, what we have not yet attained to, how much more when we have attained to it? This, indeed, is the difference between temporal and eternal things, that something temporal is loved more before it is possessed, but loses its appeal when it comes along; this is because it cannot satisfy the soul, whose true and certain abode is eternity. But anything eternal is loved more fervently when acquired than when just desired. This is because while you are desiring it, you cannot possibly think better of it than it really is, so that it disappoints you when you find it does not come up to your expectations; on the contrary, however great your estimate of it while you are on the way to it, you will find it exceeded when you eventually attain to it.
39, 43. And so people supported by faith, hope and charity, and retaining a firm grip on them, have no need of the scriptures except for instructing others. And so there are many who live by these three even in the desert without books. This leads me to think that the text has already been fulfilled in them, As for prophecies, they shall be done away with, as for tongues, they shall cease, as for knowledge, it shall be done away with (1 Cor 13:8). But with them as a kind of scaffolding, such an impressive structure of faith and hope and charity has arisen, that these people, holding on to something perfect, do not seek that which is in part—perfect, of course, insofar as that is possible in this life; because compared with the future life not even the lives of holy and just people here below are perfect. That is why there abide he says, faith, hope, charity; but the greatest of these is charity (1 Cor 13:13), because when anyone attains to the things of eternity, while the first two fade away, charity will abide, more vigorous and certain than ever.
40, 44. For that reason, when you come to realize that the end of the law is love, from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and faith without pretense (1 Tm 1:5), you will relate all the understanding of the divine scriptures to these three, and so be able to approach the study of those books without the least anxiety. When he said love, you see, he added from a pure heart, meaning that nothing else is loved except what should be loved. He brought in a good conscience, though, because of hope; it is those, after all, whose bad consciences trouble them like grit in their shoes, who despair of attaining to what they believe and love. Thirdly, and faith, he says, without pretense. If our faith lacks any falsity, then we do not love what ought not to be loved, and by living upright lives we hope for what we do love in such a way that our hope cannot possibly be disappointed. That is why I have wished to talk about things to do with faith, as much as I judged sufficient for the moment; because much has already been said on the matter in other volumes, whether by other people or by myself.
And so let that be the limit of this book. In the rest we shall discuss signs, as the Lord may grant us the ability to do so.
Notes
[1]. The way of discovery in Books I—III; the way of putting our discoveries across—that is to say, the art of preaching—in Book IV. This makes it clear from the start that when he completed the work thirty years later, he did not depart in the least from his original plan.
[2]. See Mk 6:34–44; 8:1–9.
[3]. See Ex 15:23–25; Gn 28:11–19; 22:9–14. The wood thrown into the water was a sign of the cross healing the world; the stone Jacob rested on, and set up and anointed, was a sign of Christ the cornerstone; the ram Abraham saw caught in the thorn bush and sacrificed in place of Isaac was, like Isaac, a sign of Christ sacrificed on the cross.
[4]. We must be on our guard against taking Augustine's stark antitheses too literally. He spent a very large part of his life traveling; and while he undoubtedly felt immense relief whenever he reached his destination, Carthage, or back home in Hippo Regius, or wherever it was, I am sure he did not refuse to enjoy whatever distractions the journeys offered, if only the conversation of his companions. But he did not make such enjoyments his goal. So here, in telling us only to use the world and not to enjoy it, he is telling us not to make enjoyment of it our goal, our one aim in life. We have to use it in order to reach the perfect joys of our true home country. But he would agree that there is no harm in making the best of our use of the world, and enjoying it when we can.
[5]. In the ordinary, human sense of cause, or of thing. He is simply adverting to the total inadequacy of all human language when applied to the divine mystery, or at least of all language that is not purely and simply scriptural. But if pressed, he would have agreed that the scriptural terms he goes on to deploy are not adequate either, though they cannot be improved upon.
[6]. An interesting formula, this last sentence. There is nothing quite like it in his The Trinity, attributing specifically distinct but still shared attributes to each of the three persons. It is, we could say, a poetically pleasing formula, but lacking in theological rigor.
[7]. Of course, Augustine says the Latin language, and talks of the two syllables of the word Deus.
[8]. Is this where Saint Anselm was to get his quasi-definition of God as that than which nothing greater can be thought of?
[9]. He has in mind, in general, all the old Greek philosophers, from the early pre-Socratics up to the Stoics and Neoplatonists.
[10]. Here we have the basic tenet of Augustine's illuminationist epistemology: that we know whatever we do know in the light of unchanging—that is, divine—truth, which is always illuminating our minds.
[11]. See Jn 14:6.
[12]. See Jn 1:10. Augustine is indeed in complete accord with the mind of the writer of this text in identifying the Word of God with the Wisdom of God.
[13]. See Jn 1:14.
[14]. See Jn 10:17–18.
[15]. See 1 Cor 12—14.
[16]. See Eph 1:22–23; 5:28–33.
[17]. See Rom 12:4–5; Eph 4:3; Col 3:14.
[18]. See Jn 14:6.
[19]. See Col 2:13–14.
[20]. See Mt 16:19.
[21]. This is just another name, here, for God.
[22]. This is where Augustine's sticking so uncompromisingly to his guns can appear to us rather dauntingly inhuman, even inhumane. But we need to make an effort of sympathetic imagination or, in older phraseology, of pious interpretation, and see that while by loving you for your own sake or loving myself for my own sake, he means doing it without reference to God; by loving you or myself for God's sake he does not mean "and not also for your or my sake." When I love you for God's sake, I thereby (in Augustine's use of the term) necessarily love you for your own sake, for your truest, deepest sake, because it means I am loving you, and hence "enjoying" you, in God, where you properly belong, and am wanting you to join me in enjoying God for ever.
[23]. See Wis 9:15.
[24]. Does he have in mind here some philosophical school, or more vaguely different groups of Christian ascetics? He goes on, at least, to present briefly a picture of true and false asceticism, the latter in section 25 possibly being that of the "perfect" among the Manichees; also perhaps of some orthodox Christians influenced by Manichee extremism.
[25]. Augustine tended to identify disordered lust, or concupiscence, with original sin, instead of seeing it, as a more refined theology will do, as the primary effect and sign of original sin, which in itself is simply the lack of God's integrating grace.
[26]. Here he almost certainly means the Manichees.
[27]. To us this looks like laboring the obvious. But it was not so to Augustine. This marks his authentically Christian or biblical awareness of what constitutes humanity, over against the dominant Neoplatonist zeitgeist, which so deeply affected all his thinking, and which identified the human self exclusively with the spirit or mind.
[28]. This rather casual way of leaving the order of charity to chance will not satisfy the scholastic mind, certainly not that of Saint Thomas. He devotes thirteen articles to the subject in his Summa
Theologiae, IIa IIae, q.26 (English translation, volume 34), going into great detail. He decides, for instance, that love of parents takes precedence over love of one's children and love of one's father over love of one's mother—other things, of course, such as their goodness and holiness, being equal. All the quotations from Augustine in this question come from this part of Teaching Christianity. Augustine, I suggest, is to be congratulated on not being so meticulous in the matter.
[29]. In fact, in Luke's account of the episode it was the lawyer who quoted the two commandments when Jesus asked him how he read the law. Augustine is mixing up Luke's account with Matthew's— or very possibly using a translation of Tatian's harmony of the gospels, the Diatessaron.
[30]. He repeats the same phrase in the subjunctive, "or to whom it would have to be extended, were it needed," which is so superfluous as to be merely mystifying in English. So I leave it out of the text.
[31]. The Latin has Dilectio proximi malum non operatur, which is the Vulgate reading, and which is most naturally translated, "Love of neighbor does no wrong." But the Greek has "neighbor" in the dative case, not the genitive—"Love does no wrong to the neighbor"; and the end of this section strongly suggests that that is how Augustine understood the text; either because his Old Latin version correctly had Dilectio proximo…, and it was later copyists who here "vulgatized" the text, as often happened; or else because he shrewdly construed the genitive proximi with the noun malum that follows it, rendering, literally, "Love does not work neighbor's wrong." This was as peculiar in Latin as it is odd in English, but was getting the right meaning from a faulty text.
[32]. The almost unanimous patristic interpretation, in addition to the obvious moral lesson, of the parable of the good Samaritan, Lk 10:30–37.
[33]. The prophet, that is the psalmist, is assumed to be speaking in the person of Christ. Augustine is probably thinking more of the second half of the verse, which he does not actually quote: As mourning and grieving for him, so I was humbled, as alluding to Christ's passion.
[34]. Here two manuscripts add the following sentence: "But because we are all equal by nature, and when all boasting is set aside we are all nothing else but human beings, the commandment bidding us love our neighbor was not distinguished from loving ourselves."
[35]. But not as a means toward his enjoyment of his goodness. It will emerge shortly that God "uses" us for our own good, as means indeed toward our enjoyment of his goodness.
[36]. See Rv 19:10; 22:8–9.
[37]. Cum delectatione; two venerable manuscripts have cum dilectione, to use with love.
[38]. Here at last we have Augustine's way of explaining all the obvious pleasures and joys of this life and this world—a somewhat grudging acceptance of them, one may feel!
[39]. See Jn 1:3.14.
[40]. This passage rather shows up the weakness of Augustine's exclusively Johannine, Word-centered christology. He assumes that by saying he no longer knows Christ according to the flesh, Paul means he is no longer interested in his humanity, which, when one considers the emphasis placed by Paul on the cross and on the blood of Christ, is preposterous.
What does Paul mean, then? In the first place he did not, as the later patristic theology would do and as we have done ever since, "analyze" Christ, so to say, into the two components of his divine and his human natures. His view of Christ, to adopt a fashionable "in" word, was holistic. So by "Christ according to the flesh," he possibly meant what is now called the Jesus of history, or Jesus as he appeared to his contemporaries; and that is how Paul knew him— and persecuted him—before his conversion. But since then he has known only Christ, the Lord of glory, (1 Cor 2:8).
[41]. Here he does, finally, acknowledge the significance of Christ's glorified humanity as well as of his divinity.
[42]. Saint Thomas Aquinas will follow Saint Augustine in this severe view about the wrongness of all lying without exception; later moral theologians will be more lenient about what is popularly known as the white lie, and the lie told as a joke. See Augustine's works, Lying, and Against Lying, in which occurs his famous explanation, and exculpation, of Jacob's far from white lie in Gn 27:19–29, Non est mendacium sed mysterium, it is not a lie but a mystery (Against Lying 24).
[43]. See 1 Cor 13:8–13.